“The experiment, if it inspires other cities, would mark the first significant change in playground design in decades, since municipalities began replacing steel monkey bars and slides with the boxy, plastic equipment common in many urban areas today.

It already raises fundamental questions about childhood.

How much help do children need to do what should come naturally? And to what extent does expert guidance — embodied by the so-called play workers — represent adults’ expectations of children, rather than what the youngsters themselves want or need?

“My first impression is that this is more evidence that we don’t trust kids to play by themselves,” said Peter Stearns, provost of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and author of “Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America.” “And I think it’s fair to ask: Is this really for parents, to make them feel their kids are being properly guided while playing?”

On the surface, a managed playground is a natural extension of a culture that increasingly parcels childhood into schedules. Many children in urban areas from Boston to Houston no longer run out the front door to find their friends; their parents make play dates instead. And youngsters who once might have played on a sandlot or a backyard ice rink now enter organized leagues by first grade.

Pickup games are still around, but they have migrated from the street to computers, where friends gather online at sites like Neopets and Club Penguin.

Cultural critics have warned of the dangers of replacing spontaneous play with organized activities since the 1930s, when the historian Johan Huizinga published his classic, “Homo Ludens,” about the importance of spontaneous and unstructured play to the health of societies.

Children chasing, creeping, diving into alleyways and bushes may look somehow suspect, even dangerous. But experts say the free-for-all has a point: children develop independent judgment, and a sense of risk, privacy and invention all their own when they create play worlds that exclude parents and other adults. Forcing a children’s game to have some goal, as many parents have the urge to do, in effect installs a hall monitor in the game room.

Psychologists who spend time with children, moreover, say that it is important for youngsters to navigate kids-only play situations to develop their social instincts, such as how to join a game that has already started. Designers of the proposed playground were aiming for a space that, in a sense, recaptures the imaginative, collaborative games children used to organize routinely in their neighborhoods, before play dates and the American Youth Soccer Organization.” (New York Times )

“Sweden has more blond beauties per capita, Italy and France have far better cuisine, and most of the free world can boast of better weather. But over the past 30 years, the citizens of Denmark have scored higher than any other Western country on measures of life satisfaction, and scientists think they know why.” (New York Times )

“Since the former National Football League player Andre Waters killed himself in November, an explanation for his suicide has remained a mystery. But after examining remains of Mr. Waters’s brain, a neuropathologist in Pittsburgh is claiming that Mr. Waters had sustained brain damage from playing football and he says that led to his depression and ultimate death.

The neuropathologist, Dr. Bennet Omalu of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading expert in forensic pathology, determined that Mr. Waters’s brain tissue had degenerated into that of an 85-year-old man with similar characteristics as those of early-stage Alzheimer’s victims. Dr. Omalu said he believed that the damage was either caused or drastically expedited by successive concussions Mr. Waters, 44, had sustained playing football.” (New York Times )

“Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. Yet they could just as well have examined their own neighbors, lab assistants or even some fellow scientists. New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking — the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick — are far more common than people acknowledge.

These habits have little to do with religious faith, which is much more complex because it involves large questions of morality, community and history. But magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day.

The appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress. In excess, it can lead to compulsive or delusional behavior. This emerging portrait of magical thinking helps explain why people who fashion themselves skeptics cling to odd rituals that seem to make no sense, and how apparently harmless superstition may become disabling.” (New York Times )

“Many of the new molecular tests are quick but technically demanding, and each laboratory may do them in its own way. These tests, called “home brews,” are not commercially available, and there are no good estimates of their error rates. But their very sensitivity makes false positives likely, and when hundreds or thousands of people are tested, as occurred at Dartmouth, false positives can make it seem like there is an epidemic.” (New York Times )